Engine 2467 at The S.F Golden Gate Railroad Museum in the Hunters Point shipyard houses two of the remaining steam engines built with a 4-6-2 wheel arrangement.of the 6,000 steam engines built their are only 14 remaining.Photo By Kurt Rogers

Photo: Kurt Rogers

Engine 2467 at The S.F Golden Gate Railroad Museum in the Hunters...

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Mike Russell sitting in engine 2467 at The S.F Golden Gate Railroad Museum in the Hunters Point shipyard houses two of the remaining steam engines built with a 4-6-2 wheel arrangement.of the 6,000 steam engines built their are only 14 remaining.Photo By Kurt Rogers

Jim Plunkett was taking a brake in front of #2479 where most of the work was being done .
The S.F Golden Gate Railroad Museum in the Hunters Point shipyard houses two of the remaining steamengines built with a 4-6-2 wheel arrangement.of the 6,000 steam engines built their are only 14 remaining.Photo By Kurt Rogers

Photo: Kurt Rogers

Jim Plunkett was taking a brake in front of #2479 where most of the...

Jim Plunkett smoked Salems and wore Ray-Bans, and his jeans were hitched with a big brass buckle.

Stamped on the buckle was "2467," the name of the mighty old locomotive that has been a part of Plunkett's life for almost 40 of his 46 years.

"This was my friend when I was a kid," the Albany resident said, sitting high over the tracks in the fireman's seat in the engine's cab. "When I was 7 or 8, I used to think it was the finest thing in the world."

Plunkett is a member of a mechanical brotherhood: He is a restorer of rare steam locomotives, two of which are hidden away at the Golden Gate Railroad Museum in San Francisco's old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, looking like a couple of bison lowering their heads to charge.

They are Southern Pacific's Nos. 2467 and 2472, machines made almost 80 years ago to speed passengers over long stretches of the West. Around 6,800 like them were built, and the two at Hunters Point are among 14 that have been restored and still run.

Among the SP's first powerful passenger engines, 2467 and 2472 pulled Chicago-to-West Coast trains through Utah in the 1920s. They were made to run as hard and as long as any locomotives in the world, but newer steam technology eventually busted them down to dray horses on the San Jose-to-San Francisco commuter run.

Weary from the constant starts and stops, they were old before their day when diesel killed off the nation's steam herd in the late-1950s. They were among three that the railroad donated to Bay Area governments as souvenirs.

About 15 years later, rail enthusiasts dedicated themselves to restoring the locomotives. They have put 27 years into the effort, with at least two more to go.

Their goals are to secure the nonprofit museum as the permanent home for the 2467 and 2472 and to pair up the two on regular, highballing excursions in the Bay Area. The third engine, No. 2479, is to become part of a South Bay rail-history museum at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.

At a time when money-losing Amtrak is threatening to shut down 18 passenger routes, including the successors to the SP's and the Santa Fe's storied overland runs through the West, the rail enthusiasts are more determined than ever that these survivors bear witness to the steam era and its impact on California.

They gather on weekends to keep the 149-ton beasts greased and shined, to bend iron and rack their brains on the mechanical gremlins that bedevil steam locomotives.

The 2472 is just recovering after having been laid up more than five years with an overheated wheel bearing, a disaster caused by some impossible-to- measure imbalance in the engine's weight distribution.

The 2467 developed a similar problem in September and had to be carted home from Stockton. Its keepers are resigned to another laborious repair just three years after they finished the last one. So far, they've spent $70,000 and uncounted free hours of skilled labor to renovate and maintain the 2467.

The engines were hand-built in the post-Great War years by Baldwin Locomotive in Philadelphia, without benefit of machine tools. The maintenance workers in the old train shops knew intimately each engine's quirks, but these men and their unwritten know-how have all but vanished, like a steam whistle's wail into the distance.

"The machine has an inexplicable charisma," said David Varney, who works for a Silicon Valley electronics company and is the interim project director for the restoration of the 2472. "But it's a big bag of mechanical problems. It's a big reason why these aren't around anymore. . . . It's basically trying to shake itself apart."

In the late 1950s, when Plunkett was about 3 years old, the SP sent almost all its old steam engines to the scrap yard.

When diesel swept the industry, the SP overhauled a few of its old steamers and gave them to cities and counties. Oakland got the 2467; San Mateo County, the 2472; Santa Clara County, the 2479.

Growing up next to the main line in Berkeley, young Plunkett was already train-struck. He would run to the window whenever the diesel-powered Santa Fe Super Chief, in its "warbonnet" colors of scarlet and silver, streaked by. Once, the engineer let him up in the cab at the Berkeley station.

Plunkett owned every toy steam locomotive in stock in the basement of Berkeley Hardware, and he scratch-built a scale model of the railroad's Oakland yards. He dreamed of becoming an engineer.

"It was like being captain of an ocean liner, or being an astronaut," he said.

His chance came in August 1960 when workers swung the 2467 by crane onto its display track at an Oakland city park at Seventh and Webster streets. Plunkett was there, and he returned almost every week for years to come.

His dad, a building engineer, owned a white '59 Thunderbird with a green interior and regularly drove to Oakland to pay his union dues. Young Plunkett wouldn't go home without a fantasy trip on the 2467.

The 2467, built to pull 11-car passenger trains, sat there for 30 years with only the water and oil tender as company. Rain and sprinkler spray rusted its rivets.

Christmas Eve 1990 was the last day as a fixed relic. Plunkett and his organization -- the Pacific Locomotive Society, volunteer operators of the steam-powered tourist railway in Niles Canyon -- hooked up the engine to a crane, and they hauled it to West Oakland to the SP's old "desert yards" under Grand Avenue.

They built a platform around 2467 out of bridge timbers. They dug a pit so they could get at its belly. For the next nine years, they worked on the restoration of the 2467, following the original specs to the last rivet.

The reanimation of the 2472 was equally exacting and took 15 years. Mike Mangini, the leader of the 2472 project, finally opened up the throttle in 1991.

A few months before, the 2467 project had begun under Mike Russell, a boilermaker who works on power plants, and John Manley, a Union Pacific conductor.

They stripped, for example, the caps off each of 800 bolts on the skin of the engine's boiler before restoring and replacing each fastener. They hot- riveted the sand box like ironworkers on a 1920s skyscraper.

"We're very proud of never replacing a rivet with a bolt," Russell said. ". . . Rivets have an aesthetic that just can't be replaced by bolts."

Russell restored the engine's internals, a time-consuming but theoretically simple task. A steam engine is a pure illustration of the principle of form following function.

"It's really a very simple set of equations," he said. "All the physics-in- action descriptions you ever saw are right here."

Soak a wad of cotton in kerosene, light it with a match and toss it into the firebox -- a brick-lined cylinder fueled by an oil burner. The bricks turn red-hot. A network of tubes picks up the heat and transfers it to surrounding water, creating steam.

The steam powers valves at the engine's front end, which transfer their energy to the rods that drive the 73-inch-diameter wheels.

A diesel is strong but plodding: Its job is to move tonnage. A steam locomotive gallops.

"Pacific class" locomotives like the Hunters Point pair were built to go 80 mph -- twice as fast as Amtrak -- but could reach 102 mph. It's confirmed that just before the 2467 was abandoned in the 1950s, the engineer turned to the fireman and said, "Katy, bar the door," and throttled it up to 93 going through Davis.

The 2467 and the 2472 are designated 4-6-2, referring to their wheel arrangement. There are 14 such locomotives still operating in the nation and nine under restoration, including the 2479.

The 2467 and 2472 make up one of only three operating 4-6-2 pairs in the United States. The others are in Davenport (Santa Cruz County), and Tennessee's Shenandoah Valley.

A moneymaker for the railroads, the 4-6-2 was an efficient, balanced machine. But for the men in the cab, each locomotive was a character whose mannerisms had to be mastered. No two were the same.

Some were hard to fire. Others were "good steamers." And some were "sweethearts."

Of the 2467, flat black and "dolled up" with little homemade brass stars on its wheel hubs, Plunkett said: "This has a personality. It has a soul."

Train men may not have been educated, but they had to be intuitive.

"A lot of things with steam engines is what you feel in the seat of your pants," Plunkett said. "They start to walk funny. They're very sound and feel oriented. That's how you tell."

Back in the day, the engineer listened a lot harder to the machine than he did to the younger, less-experienced seatmate on his left, the fireman.

"You're the engineer, and you don't tell the fireman nothing," Plunkett said. "The old railroad guys, they were pretty hard-bitten. . . . They wouldn't teach you, because nobody taught them nothing.

"Some," he cracked, "say an engineer can't be taught."

The volunteers who reenact the steam era have their own salty camaraderie. All started as mechanical types, but some have had to branch out into marketing, politics and showmanship to protect and promote their locomotives. Plunkett, for example, serves as impresario of the 2467. He loves nothing better than to ring the bell and play to the crowd.

"We call that the 'Plunkett valve,' " Russell said, pointing to a knob in the engine's cab. "It shuts off the air on his side so he can't blow the horn."

Few in the steam fraternity would disagree with conductor John Manley that their business is "a horrible labor of love."

Then again, few would quarrel that their pains bring a very real payoff: the satisfaction of seeing the serene, saucer-eyed looks on the faces of the spectators below.

Plunkett remembers that 40 years ago, one of those faces was his.

"It's under steam, and we're blowing the whistle when I see somebody's face light up," he said. "The first thing I say is, 'Come on up.' "